‘In-person visits have been proven to reduce recidivism.’
Photograph: Alamy

Leaving prison was one of the hardest times in my life. Re-entry is like falling out of a plane: it’s hard to land on your feet. Before I even left, six-plus years at York Correctional Institution developed in me an inability to function in a non-carceral environment. But I owe it to prison visiting rooms – which allowed some contact with the outside world – that my re-entry wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

During visits, my mother would tell me, “Lower your voice,” when I didn’t think it was elevated. She would observe, “You’re so angry,” when I wasn’t. She would ask, “Can I finish?” when I trampled her sentences. Those visits helped me to relearn the social graces that were lost while inside.

That’s why it worries me that several jails around the country have eliminated, or plan to eliminate and severely restrict, in-person visits. They want to use video visitation as a substitute. But virtual reality has never supplanted reality anywhere – so why do we expect it to in prison?

Of all the jails that have already implemented video visitation, 74% of them have closed their visiting centers permanently, according to research conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative. Too often, when video visitation becomes an option, real-life visitations cease to be.

In-person visits have been proven to reduce recidivism. A study of 16,420 prisoners over three years found that prisoners with visits have a 13% lower rate of recidivism than ones who weren’t visited behind bars. Does the same apply for video visits? Their effects haven’t been studied, but a study published in the Harvard Law Review found that nonverbal communication may be harder to interpret or be exaggerated in video court appearances. It’s not a stretch to conclude that social cues and body language won’t transmit through a camera lens in a video visitation.

There are other, more tangible problems associated with swapping out real visits for video. Pontotoc County, Oklahoma’s jail, having already sacrificed personal visits for celluloid ones, prevented inmates from receiving visits when a computer glitch disabled the system for weeks.

Anyone who thinks video visitation is a worthy replacement for personal contact – when it’s even working – doesn’t understand the connection between visitation and rehabilitation. Most people assume that the connection between visits and resuming a life of decency is that the visits make the prisoner feel valued, loved and ultimately welcomed back into society. That may be part of it, but any theory that links missing prison visits with committing another crime makes re-offending look like brattiness, a matter of attention-seeking outbursts from people who feel slighted. It’s not that simple.

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The nature of incarceration denies prisoners both independence and responsibility. When they return to the “real” world, the demands of daily life overwhelm them and they actually prefer incarceration because it’s an environment they have learned to navigate. Committing another crime is like clicking the heels of ruby slippers: they end up in a place they understand.

The visiting room is the only interface with the world and therefore one of the few defenses to “institutional syndrome” – the deficits or disabilities in social and life skills that develop after a long period living in custody. It allows you to identify which habits or traits – formed to survive the inside – need to change so that you can re-enter society.

Video visitation is just a small rectangle of reality that cannot replace the real thing. This isn’t to say that video visitation should be eliminated; it shouldn’t. Long-distance visits that otherwise wouldn’t have happened can occur regularly through video. It should remain an option, just not the only option.

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Eliminating an interface like personal visits can have disastrous consequences for public safety. The only people who benefit from phasing out in-person visitation are the profit-motivated companies who sell video visitation systems.

That’s why the California legislature is looking to pass a law that forbids the complete replacement of in-person visits with video visitation. Without such laws in place in other jurisdictions, though, the profit motive can too easily overpower public interest. Visits are one of the few facets of prison life that have the power to reduce crime; we lose them at our peril.